The Art of Deception

Hitting the Wall

Although the Underground access discovered by LaMoia and Matthews had at first interested Boldt as a way to gain access uptown, this interest lessened when it was explained that each block of Underground stood isolated behind a retaining wall and did not, to anyone’s knowledge, connect one to the next. More than six city blocks, one hundred thousand square feet each, separated the site of Chen’s death and the Shelter. Boldt held out hope that with the help of his university contact, he would be able to gain access.

He began his day by talking a grease monkey in the police garage into taking a look at Liz’s minivan since he’d missed the appointment yesterday. He then fired off a vitriolic e-mail to Captain Sheila Hill complaining about Matthews being placed on administrative leave and suggesting that “the situation be rectified by the end of the day” if CAP was “to effectively continue its work into the investigation of Hebringer and Randolf.”

He reread it twice, spell-checked it, and sent it, convinced Hill would see the error of her ways. A political beast, Hill would not want the possible tarnish of having slowed down an active investigation that carried so much press exposure and baggage.

Boldt knew it was prosecutorial suicide to have Matthews sit down with Walker ahead of her suspension being lifted, and he now believed Walker’s mention of Hebringer and Randolf key to the investigation. He had, in fact, left Matthews a voice mail encouraging her to “set up a meet” as soon as Walker next contacted her. He’d alerted Special Ops and Technical Services, wanting them ready to move at a moment’s notice. He wanted Matthews wearing a wire around the clock and he’d asked a detective, Heiman, to write up a request for a court order to trap-and-trace incoming calls to both her office phone and cell phone.

The U.S. Attorney’s office could facilitate this request. Ferrell Walker was complicating things. Boldt wanted a rendezvous. He wanted answers.

Less than an hour later, Sandra Babcock finally came through, providing a list of property ownership of eight businesses and stores that she believed might offer access into the section of Underground where Billy Chen had lost his life. This access would circumvent the city’s refusal to allow Boldt down inside the sinkhole. Boldt gumshoed for ninety minutes, business to business, store to store, eventually gaining an audience with the vice president of SeaTel Bank, a balding man who smelled of cologne. The VP confirmed the bank sat atop an old basement and summoned a maintenance man to escort Boldt downstairs.

Boldt knew that both Randolf’s and Hebringer’s finances had been checked and double-checked. Certainly if both had been customers of this or any bank, it would have been red-flagged, but he didn’t recall that information off the top of his head, and this left him wondering if his team hadn’t made a mistake. Did the abductor troll bank lobbies looking for women cashing large checks? Looking for brunettes who wore their hair to their shoulders? He grew irritable through the waiting, wondering what the hell took a maintenance man eight minutes to reach the lobby.

There were times eight minutes meant nothing, and then there were times like this when thirty seconds could set his teeth to grinding.

“That’s him,” the VP said, pointing across the lobby. Boldt saw a gaunt man with sleepy eyes, a bad set of teeth, and tight, sinewy arms bearing a tattoo of a red rose on his left forearm.

Boldt hurried across the lobby and introduced himself. Struggling against allergies or asthma, the man wheezed, “Basement’s over here,” forgoing his name. The plastic tag on his coveralls read Per Vanderhorst. He seemed nervous, as did most people when meeting a cop for the first time. Boldt doubted he was the first cop a guy like Vanderhorst had met, but at the same time, if the guy had felony priors he wouldn’t be working for a bank like SeaTel.

“I wanted to ask if you saw any flooding in your basement when that water main broke,” Boldt said, as Vanderhorst led the way.

“Not a drop.” He forced his reply dryly from his throat, sounding like someone was choking him.

Vanderhorst used one of about twenty keys on a ring to open a door marked PRIVATE, then led Boldt down an unattractive corridor past an EXIT sign on the right and another PRIVATE door to the left. At the end of this hall they entered one marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY and descended two short flights of concrete-and-steel stairs, at the bottom of which Vanderhorst hit a second light switch and motioned into a sterile, immacu-lately kept basement area that provided storage.

“My daughter has a friend Vanderhurst,” Boldt leaned on the “u” in the name. He wanted to get Vanderhorst talking, open him up about the water main break, rumors of the Underground’s existence, anything he could get from the man, but he’d been given a guy who could hardly breathe, much less make conversation.

“I heard it was the Underground that flooded in this block,”

Boldt tried.

Vanderhorst wheezed. “This is dry storage mostly.” It was stone and concrete walls, steel beams supporting the low ceiling, tube lighting bouncing off white and gray paint. Rows of industrial shelving aligned north to south stretched like library stacks floor to ceiling. Cardboard boxes bearing codes in thick black marker occupied every available inch of space.

“How about below this floor?” Boldt asked. “Anything?”

“Not that I’m aware of.” The thin man stood there like a statue. Boldt asked if he’d ever found people down here who didn’t belong.

“I’m not going to say it has never happened, because I haven’t been here all that long. But this is a bank. They don’t like the idea of strangers cruising around.” They moved on.

“Couple more rooms down here you might want to see.”

He showed Boldt three other rooms, one jammed with heating/ventilation ducts and equipment; another tangled with electric, phone, and communication wires; a third, larger and much older, that housed plumbing and steam heaters no longer in use.

The walls of this third room were brick covered in thick layers of paint. Generations earlier, some window openings had been bricked closed and painted over. Those window holes suggested an outside wall. Boldt rubbed his hand on the cool brick. “I’m looking to get on the other side of this.”

Vanderhorst remained disinterested, a maintenance guy going through the motions. “Wouldn’t that be dirt?”

Boldt repeated his earlier question about flooding, somewhat astonished that the quantity of water so close wouldn’t have resulted in any flooding.

“Listen, what do I know? You could check with my boss.”

He asked irritably, “You seen enough?”

Still touching the wall, Boldt asked, “Have you ever come across any doors, holes in the wall, the floor … anything that might lead somewhere outside this basement?”

“The bus tunnel … they had problems with that water main thing, I think.”

This comment stirred Boldt’s interest-a light went off inside him. “Which wall is that?”

Vanderhorst pointed to the nearest wall of the rectangular room. With some checking, Boldt determined it was the same wall as the one in the utility room with the bricked-up windows.

“We’re done here,” an excited Boldt announced.

Vanderhorst led the way back upstairs, letting Boldt go ahead as he lagged behind to shut off the lights.

Boldt reached the EXIT door down the hall, which was alarmed with a red panic bar.

“You’ll get me fired, you push that.” Vanderhorst stood a few yards behind Boldt, watching him. He’d crept up on Boldt, and that bothered him.

“Where’s it lead?”

“Onto Columbia. It’s a fire exit. You want to see the security people, they’re the first door to the right, upstairs, in Admin.”

Boldt thanked Vanderhorst and walked through the lobby back out onto the street, debating his next move. He had other businesses yet to explore within this city block, all with potential access to the Underground, according to Babcock.

Frustrated by his lack of discovery at the bank, Boldt called into the office and assigned two of his detectives to do that door-to-door footwork for him.

To his right, he saw the entrance to the bus tunnel station that fronted Public Safety. He made up his mind, choosing the tunnel for himself.

When Washington State builds a transportation project, 1 percent of the contracted cost is budgeted to the arts, for aesthetics.

The result is an eclectic mix of sculpture, writing, music, and painting, little gems that catch the public unaware. In the case of the pedestrian entrances to the bus tunnel, it included poetry engraved into the kick plates of the stairs, as well as colorful sculpture attached to the walls.

At the Pioneer Square station, escalators, stairs, and elevators lead down first to a vast tier, an open plaza that spans the tunnel traffic below, providing passengers access to any of several additional stairs and escalators for northbound or southbound bus routes. The incandescent lighting is bright; sounds echo off the concrete and tile, and because the buses run electrically once into the tunnel, there are virtually no odors other than a faint trace of burning rubber, a condition that put Boldt ill at ease.

The underground bus tunnel stations had not proven popular enough to account for the enormity of such a facility. It swallowed up the two dozen passengers down on the platforms awaiting the arrival of a bus, and Boldt along with them.

The director of bus tunnel maintenance, a man named Chuck Iberson, was a big man with florid cheeks and thinning white hair. Iberson’s military background showed in his attentiveness and respect for Boldt. He had treated Boldt’s summons with the utmost seriousness, arriving to meet him in less than fifteen minutes. By nature Boldt couldn’t help looking at people as possible suspects. Iberson’s overzealous willingness to respond so quickly, like Per Vanderhorst’s mealy and vaguely sleazy sniveling persona, made the detective think twice about the personalities that lurked beneath. A bank janitor might have a shot at an unsuspecting woman, as might a man in a position of authority like Iberson. Boldt knew from his years of experience that suspects often surfaced in the most unlikely places.

“I’m interested in the water main break, back on the twentieth and twenty-first of March.” He felt impatient. He’d come down here on nothing but a hunch. Nine out of ten times, such spontaneity proved a mistake.

“What a mess.” Iberson appeared suddenly uneasy, and Boldt wondered why.

“The possibility, if any, that a person could gain access to the Underground from inside the tunnels,” Boldt continued.

Iberson look confused by that suggestion. For impact, Boldt returned to his original question. “I’m investigating the drowning of a city worker. Pinpointing the source of the flooding may help us out some.”

Iberson appeared somewhat relieved.

Boldt explained, “The EMTs and Fire Rescue who hauled him out reported being inside an area that sounds to us like a part of the old Underground. Access to that area might solve some of the questions surrounding the worker’s death.”

“I got no problem with that whatsoever. You want to look at my tunnel, it’s yours. But I don’t know nothing about no underground city, and if you want to see where we flooded, we’ll have to walk it, and it’s tight in those tunnels.” He pointed to where the station’s expanse condensed to the mouths of two concrete tunnels that each carried one-way bus traffic.

“So we’ll walk it,” Boldt answered.

“Okay, but I gotta put you in an orange vest and hard hat.”

“I can live with that.”

Ten minutes later, Iberson led Boldt up the left tunnel, walking against the direction of bus traffic. They both wore Day-Glo orange vests and yellow hard hats.

The transportation department used a good number of double buses joined in the center by an accordion. Nicknamed dragons-because the second of the two sections was “dragging” behind the first-they stretched some fifty feet stem to stern and were hated by all motorists.

“If I tell you it’s a dragon coming,” Iberson warned, “you put your back against the wall and keep your toes behind the white line. Them tail sections tend to wander a little, so don’t trust what you see.”

Passing a gray door marked EMERGENCY EXIT-ALARM WILL SOUND, Boldt asked about the exits.

Iberson explained, “EERs,” pronouncing it “Ears.” “Emergency Evacuation Routes. Two per block, in both tunnels.”

“Where do they come out up top?” Boldt asked.

“Most are spiral staircases leading up to trapdoors in the sidewalks.”

Boldt had walked Third Avenue for years and never paid attention to the existence of the trapdoors. “What trapdoors?”

“They look like metal plates up there. Granted, a couple of the EERs connect through to adjacent buildings, but most head straight to the surface, swear to God.”

“Talk to me about the ones that connect through buildings.”

It occurred to Boldt these buildings might be candidates on Babcock’s list.

“Listen, with all due respect, I keep the tunnels lit and drained and the ventilation system working. I don’t know all that much about the EERs.”

There wasn’t much of anything to see. A bus approached, and Boldt pressed his back to the curved concrete. It swept past, sucking his tie from under the vest. Iberson never broke stride.

“I’d like a complete copy of the original construction plans,”

Boldt said, “including the ventilation and drainage systems.”

Iberson stopped walking and waited for Boldt to catch up. “I didn’t build them, Detective, but I can see what I can do for you.” It was lieutenant, not detective, but Boldt didn’t correct the man. Iberson pointed out two drains in the roadbed. “This is where we first saw problems. Normal drainage is no problem, and we have pumps that kick in at a certain volume, but once that water main broke, we couldn’t keep up. We had two feet down here before we knew it. Enough for the buses to hydro-plane, so we closed down. It was a bitch. The overflow had breached the ventilation ducting. It wasn’t the drains backing up, which is what we first thought-that our pumps had failed.”

He pointed to a massive grill installed high on the cement wall.

“Don’t ask me how, because we still haven’t figured it out, but this baby was basically a waterfall.”

Boldt said, “That other emergency door we passed. That would be more like the middle of the block?”

“A little north of center.”

“I’d like a look at it.” Boldt clarified, “Inside it.”

Iberson motioned Boldt back well before a dragon rushed past, wind and dust kicking up behind it. He said, “Sure thing.”

They walked a distance in silence. By this time Boldt’s thoughts were sparking as he assembled a possible explanation for both the missing women and what Iberson had been telling him. He explained as if he absolutely knew this to be fact, “Your ventilation duct penetrates the original retaining wall, constructed to enclose what once were street-level storefronts. When the water main broke, it flooded that area deep enough that your vent went underwater, creating your waterfall and flooding your tunnel.”

They reached the door. It was marked 19.

Boldt asked, “This is which kind, spiral stairs and trapdoor, or building access?”

Iberson shrugged. He didn’t have a clue. “You want a look?”

“Yes.”

Iberson disarmed the door with a key and led Boldt through, saying immediately, “It’s not the trapdoor variety.”

Boldt hadn’t thought so, but he said nothing, preoccupied with trying to put himself in Chen’s shoes or even those of Hebringer and Randolf.

The floor was textured steel plate, the walls a gray metal paneling. The lights flickered on with the opening of the door.

It was a man-made hallway leading twenty feet straight ahead to another door.

“Detective?”

“Lead on.”

They walked twenty or thirty feet before climbing a short flight of steel “fire escape” steps, at the top of which yet another sign on a steel door warned of alarms. Iberson keyed this door as well and pushed it open. It accessed a basement room bearing large EXIT signs directing pedestrians up a flight of stairs to reach the surface. The room itself felt eerily similar to the bank basement Vanderhorst had shown Boldt. If Iberson had his directions correct, then it even seemed possible this room shared a wall with the bank. The basement smelled of fresh paint and mildew. Boldt could hear the rumble of the overhead street traffic for the first time, a sound absent in the bus tunnel.

Iberson said, “Most all of the basement accesses I’ve seen look about like this. Basically nothing in them but a few signs directing traffic.”

Boldt turned and studied the wall the door had led through.

It, too, showed evidence of former windows having been bricked up. The hallway they had passed through connected this wall to the bus tunnel.

Boldt stood there for a few seconds, all else tuned out. He put Hebringer and Randolf into this space-a transcendental moment when he experienced an actual image of a man dragging an unconscious woman by the arms. It was a dreamy, jagged image, not born of anything that had happened here, but his own creation. He knew this perfectly well, and yet he went with it, allowing himself the luxury of a vivid imagination. The man had the woman by both wrists. Her hair cascaded to the floor.

Her blouse ripped, her bra pulled down exposing her right breast, her head hung to the side, lifeless. The killer pulled the gray door open, only to have Boldt find his own left hand on the cool steel metal. The killer looked back at him, but before Boldt could see the face, it melted, along with the man himself.

Susan Hebringer lay on the floor of the man-made hallway connecting the basement to the tunnel. Her eyes popped open, and she looked directly at Boldt. Her face and body changed to that of Chen, the city street worker. Chen had been clubbed on the back of the head and was bleeding. Then he, too, was gone.

“Did you hear anything I just said?” Iberson asked.

Boldt lifted a finger for silence. He studied the door as would any SID tech, running his fingers along its edge, reaching overhead, fingering the crack at the hinges. In a voice he did not recognize as his own, he asked, “How often are the alarms checked? The door alarms,” he clarified.

“I … ah …”

Boldt motioned for Iberson to step through the fire door with him, and the two stood in the steel hallway, and Boldt pulled the door shut behind them. “Arm the door,” Boldt instructed.

Iberson’s hand shook slightly as he keyed the panic bar.

“Okay?” Boldt asked.

“Okay,” Iberson answered.

Boldt pushed against the door’s panic bar and swung the door open. No alarm sounded. Boldt shot Iberson a knowing look.

“No fucking way,” Iberson said, astonished. “Pardon the French,” he said, covering himself.

Boldt examined the doorjamb and located a wire intended for the panic bar. The wire’s insulating sheath had been cut open, a thin blue jumper wire twisted to connect two of the four multicolored wires. The main part of the wire had been cut, no longer connected to the panic bar. Boldt pointed out the modi-fication to Iberson.

“Fuck me,” Iberson said, no longer apologetic for his language.

“Check the other one,” Boldt said, pointing back toward the tunnel. Iberson took off at a run. The hallway was like a jetway at an airport. It thundered as Iberson ran.

Boldt turned and studied the hallway as Iberson stepped through the far emergency door and back into the bus tunnel.

The man pulled the door shut behind him. A moment later when he pushed through, it was to silence. No alarm.

“I’ll be goddamned. How’d you know that?” Iberson’s surprise seemed authentic. If he’d had anything to do with the tampering of these doors, he was a damn good actor.

Boldt reasoned it through-the disarmed doors gave the perpetrator access from both the tunnel and from wherever the basement exit led. He reconsidered: Was it access, or an escape route? Was it both? His chest tight with anticipation, he knew this was a solid discovery-the tampering all but confirmed it.

He thought it through again: an exit or entrance from the bus tunnel, an exit or entrance from the basement of some building up on Third Avenue. “It doesn’t help him,” he muttered.

“What’s that?” Iberson asked, studying the sabotaged wiring on the tunnel door as Boldt had on the interior door. “Same story here.”

Boldt moved panel to panel along the hallway wall. He pushed, thumped a fist against the steel, then jammed his fingers into the cracks and pulled hard as if trying to open a cabinet that had lost its handle. One after the next, he proceeded down the length of the hallway, crossed over, and started up the north side of the hall. The third panel away from the bus tunnel rattled loudly when he thumped it with his closed fist. He signaled Iberson to join him, and the two of them ran their fingers into the cracks, attempting to pry. All at once, the panel jumped off its frame several inches. It was held by a wire-a section of the same colored wire used to bypass the alarm systems-twisted on the far side of the panel. In the dark.

A damp, heavy air surged through the open crack. It smelled like a swamp in there.

Reaching for a pair of latex gloves, Boldt said, “You’re going to have to close the southbound tunnel. Make an excuse.”

“Like hell!”

“In about ten minutes, this place is going to be crawling with lab personnel.” Boldt checked his cell phone service. No signal.

“I’ve got to get to the surface,” he said anxiously. “In the meantime, we lock this up. You and I go out together. No one touches anything. And if anyone asks, you tell them it flooded again.

Whatever you want, I don’t care. But I want no mention of police, no mention of my visit, no mention of the lab guys. You screw it up, I’ll not only have your job, I’ll have you in for obstruction. Are we clear on that?”

“I got it,” Iberson said. He glanced back at the partially open wall panel and shook his head. “If I hadn’t seen it with-”

“You didn’t see it,” Boldt said.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“You didn’t see it,” Boldt repeated sternly.

“The hell I didn’t,” Iberson said. “I gotta put my boss into the loop. You want, I can put you two in touch directly. Closing down a tunnel, that’s serious business.”

More serious than you think, Boldt nearly said. “I saw pay phones on that upper level.”

Iberson checked his pants pockets as he shut the EER behind them. “You got any quarters?” he asked.